I play the wrong guitar chord and sigh.

“The most important thing we can learn as musicians is how to be sensitive to other people and their needs,” says my swing guitar teacher. He shares a jazz chord finger technique with me, and I’m back on track. His patience builds my confidence. We alternate soloing over swing standards like “Sweet Sue” and “Sweet Georgia Brown.”

Ninety-year-old Frank Hamilton played with Woody Guthrie and Pete Seeger. Now he teaches us at the school that bears his name.

The Frank Hamilton School in Decatur, Georgia, invites students from all levels of musicianship. A beginner banjo player might sit next to a lifetime fiddle player in a bluegrass music course. “Frank’s always reiterating that we’re all musicians here, whatever level you are. It really relaxes people,” says Mick Kinney, who teaches jug band and folk music theory. The school is a “third place” for many students—a place outside the environments of work and home where we can socialize, hang out, and meet new people.

Students range from children to retirees. Classes are offered almost every day of the week. Currently offered: Irish Bodhran Drum, Songwriting Labs, Mountain Dulcimer, Jug Band Music, and various genres and levels of guitar, mandolin, fiddle, and banjo. The school welcomes course suggestions and broadens its catalog every quarter.

Imagine sitting at a campfire at night with your friends, and everyone grabs an instrument and starts to jam on a song. We would call that a hootenanny. Classes at the school have a hootenanny vibe.  Students sit in a circle and jam while also learning craft and technique from an instructor and taking turns soloing or singing lead. Hamilton discovered hootenannies circa 1949.

“My mother was working for a dance company in Los Angeles composing music and knew one of the ladies on the board of directors,” he says. “Her husband fought in the Spanish Civil War and conducted hootenannies in his home in Laurel Canyon. So, as a kid, I went to some of these and started bringing my guitar.”

One night at a hootenanny in Topanga Canyon, just west of L.A., Hamilton sang the classic folk song “Sam Hall.”

“A large, bearded gentleman—looked like a mountain man to me—came up and said, ‘Hey kid, I like the way you sung that. I’m having a gathering at my home in Santa Monica, and I want you to come and meet some fellow musicians.’” The bearded man was Will Geer, a famous Hollywood actor, best known for his role as Grandpa “Zeb” in the TV series The Waltons. Hamilton would meet a lifelong friend and fellow musician at a hootenanny, Folkways Records artist and recordist Guy Carawan. Hamilton and Carawan gigged around Los Angeles, and played any venue that would have them.

Driven by a growing civil rights movement, they both avidly supported the Highlander Folk School, a training ground for union organizers. In the 1950s, while visiting the center in Monteagle, Tennessee, Hamilton heard “We Will Overcome” for the first time and adapted the tune. Inspired by the Saint Paul Baptist Church in Los Angeles, Hamilton’s rendition contains strong rhythms of church choir services. Pete Seeger heard the song, and thought “will” should change to “shall.” In 1960, the final product became “We Shall Overcome,” the unofficial anthem of the civil rights movement—even quoted in speeches by Martin Luther King, Jr. The version is credited to four songwriters: Zilphia Horton, Guy Carawan, Frank Hamilton, and Pete Seeger.

“We all agreed all the royalties would go into a fund to benefit the freedom movement,” Carawan said in an interview. “So they set up a structure so people could apply for grants.” Revenue from commercial use of the song still today feeds the We Shall Overcome Fund at the Highlander Folk School, which encourages cultural activists, educators, and organizers to apply with projects addressing racism, economic and environmental injustice, sexism, and homophobia.

Inspiration

While in college in the 1940s, Hamilton met one of his early musical influences. He needed to learn a Sonny Terry harmonica line for a theater course, and he knew of a musician living at Will Geer’s ranch who played with Sonny Terry. That musician was Woody Guthrie.

“So, I made an appointment to go up and visit Woody in the seed shack in Topanga Canyon,” Hamilton recalls. “I took up my banjo, and he liked my banjo playing, so he and I were picking buddies for a while. He didn’t keep track of time. Time for him was a construct for businesspeople, students, and marriage. He was outside of all that. He just wanted to sit, pick, and play, and if it took a couple of days, that would be fine. He was a tremendous influence.”

Two of Hamilton’s mentors inspired his teaching style for the school. The first was acclaimed ethnomusicologist and early Smithsonian Folklife Festival staff member Bess Lomax Hawes. “I was privy to her classes and I sort of sat at her feet and learned how to teach guitar and banjo and sing folk songs to people in a class setting.” Hawes invited Hamilton to teach at the UCLA Extension division in 1963. This position opened doors for Hamilton, cementing his reputation in the broader folk music community.

As for his second mentor: “I saw a man playing a five-string banjo by the fireplace at one of Geer’s hootenannies. I thought I saw sparks coming out of his fingers, he was so good.” That banjo player was Pete Seeger. Hamilton admired Seeger’s music philosophy. “He’d always wanted music to be part of the people. He did not think of music as being exclusive to academies.”

Hamilton and Seeger recorded an album together in 1959 for Folkways Records (now Smithsonian Folkways), Nonesuch and Other Folk Tunes—a series of instrumentals with guitar and banjo and a couple tracks with vocals. “It was the most fun I ever had recording,” Hamilton recalls. His second Folkways album, Frank Hamilton Sings Folk Songs, recorded in 1962, was more of a struggle. “I had a cold that day, and I had to travel from Midtown Chicago up to the north end, on the subway, with five instruments. It was hard.”

When Seeger left The Weavers in 1958, Hamilton joined up but lasted just nine months. “They didn’t think I was a good fit, but my experience was wonderful,” he says. “The Weavers were established and had large audiences, and it helped me in terms of learning how to perform.”

Let’s Jam!

Hootenanny music fills the auditorium for Hamilton’s ninetieth birthday bash. My invitation said to bring an instrument, so I brought my guitar. Frank Hamilton School executive director Maura Nicholson calls out the next tune to jam on, and we all sync. Banjos, fiddles, mandolins, and guitars as far as the eye can see. Hamilton walks around in admiration of the songs and excitement in the air.

“The approach of jam sessions—you listen to one another, you make up things as you hear them and you contribute to the music as a whole,” Hamilton told me later. “It’s kind of like a musical democracy.”

Jams are learning opportunities. In the old-time music course at the Frank Hamilton School, I learned that a rhythm guitar holds as much weight as the lead fiddle playing melody. Every musical component shares equal importance. I also learned about the second half during a jam. “The second half is a big deal because that’s when everybody comes together,” says Bob Bakert, the school’s co-founder. “Different people lead and contribute.” The second half of my old-time music course doubled in size when the bluegrass jam joined us. I was amazed how some musicians knew all the songs by heart.

Jams also provide tools for folk songs to originate. “Say you’re sitting on the front porch and learning tunes that were handed down by families,” Hamilton says. “Like in a dance situation, the dance musicians would play some form of improvisation for the dancers in a swing dance or a barn dance.” Before social media and meet-up groups, dances sparked opportunities to meet your next lifelong friend or future spouse. The school hosts a barn dance series covering various genres of music: Appalachian fiddle, Irish, Cuban, and contra.

A jam is like “having a conversation, except musically,” Hamilton says. At his namesake school, students gain confidence after every jam session. They build their song repertoire and learn group-playing dynamics: how to count off a song, when to solo, when it’s time to end, etc.

Hamilton understands the needs of students because he remains one himself. He left one of our interviews early one afternoon so he wouldn’t be late for a harmonica course. He never stops learning. “I think curiosity can save your life. The only reason to get up in the morning is because you want to learn something, the desire to know something.”

The Old Town School of Folk Music

“Music is not an exclusive club,” Hamilton believes. “It’s something that’s accessible to everyone who wants it and should have it as a birthright.”

These words resonated from the beginning when he co-founded his first music school, the Old Town School of Folk Music in Chicago in 1957, with a fellow student, Win Stracke. “There’s a little piece of Frank in everybody that comes to take classes [at Old Town School] because he helped get the ball rolling,” says Jim Newcomb, its former executive director. The school currently enrolls 13,500 students a year—6,500 at the physical school and the remainder are out in the community. School courses range from rhythms of West Africa to the Beatles.

Newcomb explains Old Town’s origins: “What they established on literally day one was this idea that we’re all in it together, and the scale that we’re doing it on is music. That’s the field we’re playing in. Look at pictures on the opening night… Big Bill Broonzy and Odetta were there. It was doctors and lawyers and accountants and trash collectors and whoever. This idea that racial and economic and social barriers that prevent people from forming a community together had to come down in that room so that people could learn together. You couldn’t put yourself above anybody else in the room, and you shouldn’t feel beneath anybody else in that room.”

The Magic of Mary

Hamilton moved to Atlanta in the 1980s. Over time, he got out on teaching and took a break. He kept the music alive by hosting informal jams in his house over the next couple of decades. Bob Bakert frequented these events. “Every Thursday or Tuesday night, Frank and his wife Mary hosted six or eight of us. We’d sit in a circle, and Frank would teach all these old jazz tunes to these guys. Frank was really organized about it and handed out charts. Mary always made treats for us all. It was great stuff.”

Mary passed away in 2014, and her passing started a long mourning period for Hamilton. Bakert remembers the tragic period: “I said, ‘Frank, what can I do for you? We gotta get you out of this, and I know you’ve got a lot of grieving to do, but you also need to make sure that you know people love you and you have friends to help you.” A Scientific American article motivated Hamilton out of grief. He learned that human DNA contains an “imitation” gene that allows us to learn by imitating others. The article inspired him to start teaching again—as a responsibility, to share his wisdom and knowledge of music.

With some help from the business-savvy Bakert, the two co-founded the Frank Hamilton School. The first incarnation held courses at a church in 2014, and, after some time and a location shift, the school put roots down in Decatur in 2021, which brought Hamilton back into a school setting.

“The vision I have for the Frank Hamilton School was what I did originally with Win Stracke when we formed the Old Town School,” Hamilton says. “My vision was a multicultural musical center where every culture in the world felt that they could participate and disseminate their information to other people. I’m hoping that the school will embrace other musical cultures other than their own, because only with the understanding of other musical cultures can we really begin to appreciate our own.”

Singing a Tradition

In April 2024, the inaugural class of the Folk Americana Roots Hall of Fame acknowledged Hamilton’s accomplishments and contributions to American folk music with the Paul Robeson Artist/Activist Award.  “I think [Robeson is] one of the greatest American heroes we’ve ever had,”  Hamilton says. “I’m just deeply honored that I would get something that’s under the same umbrella of Paul Robeson.”

At the end of our lesson, it’s late, and we’ve just finished jamming, but I think Hamilton could play all night. We played a bundle of songs, and I leave the class a little more confident in my playing. He also gave us some homework: to study Count Basie’s band, especially guitarist Freddie Green. As we’re putting our instruments back in their cases, Hamilton leaves us with just a few last thoughts.

“The more you can know about the background [of a song], the people that sing it, the history, the culture—the more exciting it becomes. When you sing a song, you’re not just singing a song. You’re singing a tradition. You’re singing an experience that people have had in the past. You’re singing about historical revelation.”

Ian Volpi is a writing intern at the Center for Folklife and Cultural Heritage and a storyteller from Atlanta, Georgia.